


be transparent for a while

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: (even if i could) make a deal with god [your blue-eyed boys related short-fic] [70]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky has issues, Disabled Character, Fragile accords, Gen, Mentally Ill Character, Natasha Needs a Hug, Natasha has issues, Natasha looks after people a lot, Natasha's Psychological Expertise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-27
Updated: 2015-05-27
Packaged: 2018-04-01 11:28:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4018030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a lot to know about the Black Widow. Like how the reason <i>she</i> can't remember any time when this kind of shit didn't shape her life is because it started before she turned five, like how she learned violence, hunting and being hunted the way most kids learn body-language, eye-line, and what'll happen after they use which tone of voice with which adult. </p><p>That her first masters were willing to fight SHIELD outright <i>and</i> sacrifice other graduates from the same program for the chance at getting her back under control. That despite the fact that up to four girls every four years came out of the program, supposedly for interchangeable use, as far as the world's fucking concerned the title's now singular, and it's all hers. </p><p>That the last thing you ever, ever want to do is give her time to breathe or time to think or a chance to gather resources. And that until she's dead and you've killed her yourself and burned the body, she hasn't given up. She's just waiting for her opening.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> As always, _not_ Age of Ultron (or anything released after) complaint. 
> 
> Not enough to want to put the major warning on, but for those who need it, brief content note for glancing description of what happens when you shoot someone in the head.

The sky is grey, it's cold, it's threatening to rain, his head hurts, and Romanova needs new fucking hobbies. 

Ones that don't involve fussing over people or following him around. 

If he were being fair, he'd have to admit the latter doesn't count as a hobby, being as this is the first time she's done it; if he were being fair, he'd have to admit that she mostly fusses at people who need fussing at whether they like it or not, and maybe even admit that he'd be doing it if he weren't such a fucking pathetic mess. But he doesn't feel like being fucking fair, especially since the point of being up on roofs instead of down on the ground is so he doesn't _have_ to deal with people and their shit, whatever that shit happens to be today. 

Even if it's mostly his shit, and because he _can't_ , more than _so he doesn't have to._

So it's absolutely pure fucking spite that means he uses the corners of air-intake-and-door on this roof to switch on her, turn this from her following him to him tracking her and an idle game of seeing how close he can get before she _knows_ where he is. Because she is good at what she does and he actually knows _exactly_ how good. Because fucking thanks all _that_ shit was bright and fresh and new, and that's the advantage of intel that comes directly from the people who helped maintain her training and level of skill. 

That skill means she knows what he's done more or less right after he's done it, and she's alert and looking right from that moment. And there's a nasty little thread through his thoughts that he doesn't like, wondering if she's uneasy, wondering if there's any fear crawling up her neck now and trickling through her thoughts. 

And a broader trail of disgust that means he notices the thought and, spite aside, tries to throttle it. 

There's a lot to know about the Black Widow. Like how the reason _she_ can't remember any time when this kind of shit didn't shape her life is because it started before she turned five, like how she learned violence, hunting and being hunted the way most kids learn body-language, eye-line, and what'll happen after they use which tone of voice with which adult. 

That her first masters were willing to fight SHIELD outright _and_ sacrifice other graduates from the same program for the chance at getting her back under control. That despite the fact that up to four girls every four years came out of the program, supposedly for interchangeable use, as far as the world's fucking concerned the title's now singular, and it's all hers. 

That the last thing you ever, ever want to do is give her time to breathe or time to think or a chance to gather resources. And that until she's dead and you've killed her yourself and burned the body, she hasn't given up. She's just waiting for her opening. 

It means this game-that-isn't could probably go on damn near forever, since he's not actually going to kill her, but she either gets bored, annoyed or decides she's done wasting time and takes the next opportunity to use the brick rim around the edge of a roof to get gravity on her side. She still ends up on her back, one knee pinning her left leg and both hands pinned - since he isn't either out to hurt her or worried about her _succeeding_ at throwing him off from there - and wincing, but whatever fucking reason she has for following him, she doesn't look that unhappy about ending up here. 

"You _are_ a jerk sometimes," she says, with a not-even-half-hearted attempt to sound annoyed. 

"What do you _want_ , Romanova?" he demands, and since she started in Russian he stays there. She shifts slightly and frowns. 

"Right now I want you to let go of my left arm and get off my leg, there's a rock _right_ under my elbow and another one digging into my thigh," she says and he steps on the irritation that tries to flare further than is really safe. 

"Don't dodge the fucking question and I'll think about it," he replies, and she sighs. It's only mostly theatrical. 

"I _know_ you know infinitely more details about my capabilities than I do about yours," she tells him, giving him a level look. "Are you _really_ surprised I'd take an opportunity to fill in some of the blanks? Now seriously: let go and let me get rid of the rocks." 

Trying not to grind his teeth, he sits back and lets go of her forearms. She wasn't lying: the jagged edged small stone is there when she moves her arm and she sweeps the other out from under her leg as she slides herself back from him to sit up and lean back on her hands, crossing one ankle over the other. 

And it's . . . complicated, looking at someone so close when the last time you saw them, how best to kill them was _still_ the thought at the top of your mind. 

Well - no, not the last time. But the last time _alone_ , the last time he wasn't . . . filling in context, behaviour, _reality_ from other people around him: at least Steve, often a half dozen more. He hasn't dealt with only her since he made his point in the kitchen, months ago. And the fact that she's clearly more grounded, more stable, less . . . off than she was that night just makes her more like the woman who was his first problem on the causeway, and an irritating one. It throws his head off: back there even irritation was far away, secondary to the mission. And only because of the mission. 

Ideally you don't even try to kill someone like Natalia Romanova up close; ideally you use a .50 cal to decorate the wall behind her with her brains and shattered skull from half a mile away - and before she even knows you're hunting her, because once she does know, she's not going to give you the fucking chance. It hadn't been ideal, because that fucking bastard didn't give up and give in and order them killed until it was way, way too late for that, substituting collateral for planning. 

Level six: no stealth, no subterfuge, no limits, no pause until the targets are dead. He . . . _thinks_ he remembers pieces of other level six targets, but he might be making them up. If there were, there weren't any other survivors. 

He might, someday, be able to tell Wilson that he was the only thing that day that didn't go according to plan. 

That the plan had never been to kill them in the car, or right out of the crash, because you don't look at that kind of target and plan on killing them with your first move, your first attack. That the single purpose of the fucking extra bodies with him had _been_ to be extra bodies, to keep Steve occupied with killing his way free of them while _he_ dealt with Romanova, because of the way she thought, because of what she could do with five minutes of breathing room and a handful of collateral civillians that Steve couldn't and _wouldn't_ \- and even with that, there were still fallbacks. 

That given this kind of target there isn't any such thing as overkill, and you _always_ plan at least one bullet for the corpse. 

That without Wilson, he'd still've shot Steve in the face while _Steve_ was standing there stunned, and then dealt with Romanova. Because his gut response to anything that shook the world up was to kill it, and kill it fast. Was. Is. 

He can't tell anyone, yet. He can think about it, a little, carefully, but if he tried to say it, if he even had to listen to someone else talking out loud, if he knew for a fact someone _else_ was thinking about it -

It would end badly. 

So it's complicated, looking at her this close when his head is full of gauging how close to her face he should drive the broken spoon into the wall, or releasing the grenade while waiting to find out what other place she was going to come from. And complicated even more by being willing to bet she can at least stab a guess at what he's thinking. 

"What _do_ you want?" he repeats and she tilts her head to the side. 

"Don't buy my answer?" she asks. "It's true, you know." 

He restrains from smacking her, and then tries to balance the sudden surge of habits so old that they're fragmented and unreliable and erratic anyway, that suddenly want to put her into a category of _woman_ where _woman_ means - 

Things that it never really did, anyway, things that say more about how men think about women, and things that sure as fuck don't apply to the woman in front of him but make everything he's done since he saw her so wrong he can't even - 

"I don't buy you doing anything for one reason," he replies levelly, "when you could be doing it for six. Last time, Romanova, before I drop you down to perch on someone's windowsill and let you wait for the fucking fire department to get you down." 

(And the threat feels stilted in his head; it's not in his nature to _threaten_. Not anymore.) 

She tilts her head to the other side and narrows her eyes. "Headache?" she asks and he bites back a snarl. 

" _Natasha,_ " he snaps, dropping the cadences to English too, and she holds up one hand and takes a deep breath. 

"I'm edgy, too," she says, evenly, following the language shift. "Straight answers aren't exactly a habit, and other habits die hard." 

He eyes her, as she slides back further and gets to her feet. "Come get a coffee," she says and this time the impulse he resists is a purely childish one to lash out to kick her legs out from under her and land her on her ass. 

 

When they get to the street, Romanova talks. 

She talks about the Tower, and Elizabeth and Banner, Hill and Potts and Stark, skims over Barton and circles back to Wilson, all of it small-talk. He pays more attention to keeping track of where people are before they get close enough to startle him than he does to what she's saying. He considers losing her, more than once, and letting her keep her complicated motivations to herself, but the mention of coffee reminded his body he hasn't eaten anything since six and if he's not careful he'll end up with vertigo again and then he _might_ just actually kill her out of displacement, like some kind of fucking stressed animal. 

And Starbucks is an easy way to fill in calories that isn't actually eating, which is something that right now he's way too irritated to talk himself into. 

He circles them back to the one nearest home, so that he can go break something if his patience with Romanova really does run out. The girl Sheena's at the counter, and her smile turns from retail habit to recognition - although she still mostly skips trying to start conversation, for which he's grateful. But after he orders the mocha breve he glances at the unexpected flatness of the bun at the back of her head today and says, "New hair?" 

Her smile turns to a look that says _ugh_ louder than she could. "Yeah. Huge mistake. I let my brother's girlfriend talk me into it, and that was dumb." She rolls her eyes. "Gonna cut it all off and start again and make sure I ignore people who keep telling me how stylish I'd look if it was all sleek." 

"It did look better before," he says, because it's true, and she flashes a grin. 

"Thank you," she says. "See, that's why I like you. Now I got backup." 

He ignores Romanova's amused look; when the drinks come up he passes hers over and heads for the door, because there's too many people in here for him to handle without breaking something. If she doesn't come quick enough, he _will_ lose her. 

But Romanova just follows him, looking at her cup and frowning. Eventually, far enough away from other people that he feels like he can slow down, she says, "This is _two_ sizes bigger than I ordered." 

"Sheena does that," he says, shortly, and Romanova raises her eyebrows. He ignores her. He's not interested in her thoughts on any of it. 

Then she shakes her head like she's shaking something off and says, "Let's sit over there," pointing to the edge of a park with a soccer field and a bench, moving towards it before he could answer even if he meant to. He doesn't, but he follows her and sits on the other end of the bench from her. 

Romanova bends her knee and tucks one foot under the other thigh in spite of the dirt it'll get on her jeans. She looks at the guy with two younger-than-school-age kids kicking a ball around in spite of the weather, and then after a minute she looks down at the drink she's holding in both hands. 

"Steve is my friend," she says, without preamble. And whether she's enough in her own head she doesn't notice the tension he can't actually keep from snapping back through him, or whether she's ignoring it, she goes on, "I don't actually have many of those. I have Barton," she says, looking up at the kids and the man again, "I had Nick, I might have Maria, I have a couple people you don't know, but they're . . . mostly something else. They were there before I knew how to have friends." She looks back at the cup and her mouth moves in the shape of a smile that isn't. "Not something my curricula were heavy on." 

The ghost of the joke can't do anything but fall flat, and she clears her throat and takes a drink of whatever it was she ordered. 

He doesn't say anything. Mostly he doesn't say anything because his mind is blank, empty grey: he doesn't know what she's getting at, doesn't know what she wants, so he can't . . . _have_ a reaction. Not yet. Even the first snap, the one at the possessive pronoun he can't _help_ and not for any of the fucking reasons anyone would think - not for possession, sure as fuck not for jealousy, and if for fear it's fear of nothing he can fucking articulate - it fades into the grey and waiting. 

"He's also the only person who just asked," Romanova says, digging the toe of her boot into the dirt. 

He drags his thoughts towards focus, towards her words meaning something _now_ instead of being noises and sound until they start painting the shape of what she wants. Tries to make himself listen. And dimly, through the clinging, sucking mud of that, he thinks she looks . . . young. For a moment. 

"Asked, and have to, wasn't part of an op, I didn't start it by trying to get close, we were - " and it feels like she's looking through something almost like looking through files, trying to find the word, " - colleagues. I liked him," she says, like she's clarifying, "I cared what happened to him, but that's true of a lot of people who are smart enough to keep their distance. I don't need care to be reciprocal." 

She clears her throat and this time she stares at the bench just beside her bent knee; when she starts talking again, for a minute at least it sounds like it's close to coming through her teeth, and she feels less unfamiliar, for a second. 

"And I'd appreciate it," she says, evenly, "if you realize this is incredibly uncomfortable and I don't talk to people like this. It's not something I do." She shakes her head a little again, dragging her gaze up and taking a breath. 

And waiting. 

Damn it. Damn _her_. 

There's a long unsteady fucking moment before he can find what feels like a solid place to answer from, and knows it comes out tight and edged when he says, "So why are you?" 

It's almost like she was holding that breath the entire time she was waiting for him to reply, and now she lets it out slowly. Briefly glances up, blinks a few times, before she takes another deep breath. "Because there are two things you should know," she says. "That I need you to know." 

And he still has no idea what she's doing. 

None. Nothing - 

Nothing except the itch in the back of his head that says he might have, once. Or might, later. When something works that isn't working now, that he doesn't even - right now - remember how to look for. Or something gets out of the way that's blocking everything now. When, if he remembers. If he can. 

And out in the field one of the little boys falls over hard enough that he starts crying, more out of shock than anything else. 

Romanova traces the top circle of the coffee lid. "In your kitchen," she says (and for a moment, all thoughts feel jarred like something with wheels hitting a curb - can't think of a time she was in _his_ kitchen - before something snarls and hauls him back, throws at him that she means _the kitchen at home_ , that the _you_ 's probably plural, _idiot_ ), "you told me the thing I should worry about is you deciding I'm a threat to him. And you're right." 

She tucks her hair behind her ear and says, "The first thing I'd _like_ you to know is that I'm not. And," she goes on right away, "before you ask how you can believe that, I'd like to say I don't think I can be much _more_ obvious about handing you all the pieces and cues you'd need to figure out how to read me doing just about everything. At least not without having to leave the US again for another fucking year and I'd rather not do that." 

For what feels like a long time, he does _try_ to find a fucking answer for that. Feels part of him trying to find an answer she'd _want to hear_. In the end, he can only find, "We'll see," quiet, not harsh. 

Romanova watches his face for a moment before she nods, but she doesn't look . . . unhappy. 

"The other thing you need to know," she says, her voice more normal, rhythm back closer to habit, to cadences she uses when she's saying things she wants to say, "is that he was a fucking mess before you came home. Steve. And I don't mean," she goes on, without pausing, without looking at him, "between Insight and you coming home. I mean from _waking up_." 

Something makes the muscles around his ribs tight, means it takes more to breathe properly, and this time he's pretty sure the reason she's not looking at him has nothing to do with her - is because _he_ doesn't want her to and she knows. However the fuck she knows, at least things like this.

He looks at her hands. Her nails are silver, one of them still running around the rim of the cup, but the manicure's starting to give in under the pressure of every day. 

"In New York he lived in a furnished rental that looked the same when he moved out as when he moved in," Romanova continues, matter of fact. "After New York, he took Fury's offer and moved to DC. And for about a month he talked about finding his own place, and then three months later he was still living in the hotel. He didn't move out until HR found a place for him and bought it with his bank account. And they furnished it for him, and two years later the only things in it the agent didn't put there were a few things on the mantelpiece and the turntable. And it looked nice," she adds. "HR was good at their job.

"I didn't have anything for comparison," she says, turning her coffee cup in her hand. "What records exist are long on hagiography and short on detail, and while I've spoken to Former Director Carter a few times, I couldn't exactly go and ask her for the details I was missing. Now, though - now I know what a place looks like when he gives enough of a shit to make it what he wants. The DC apartment wasn't it." 

And for a second, just one, Bucky feels his hand trying to go for something around his neck - not . . . something bad, something older, loose, long chain, not a necklace. Tags, he thinks. His tags. He used to fucking fiddle with them, he remembers. But they're long gone.

He digs his thumbnail into one of the grooves in his left wrist instead. 

"He also didn't know anyone he hadn't met through SHIELD," Romanova says. He looks at her, thinks he's frowning, and she briefly meets his eyes and shrugs. "Sam Wilson was the first person outside of work he willingly had a conversation with," she says, flatly. "Believe me, by that point I was keeping inappropriately close track." 

"At that point you were trying to set him up with anyone under the sun," Bucky hears himself say, the words and the voice startling and normal, except he doesn't remember deciding to say anything. He takes a drink to cover his own surprise. Romanova laughs, sharp. 

"James at that point I was hoping he would get so _annoyed_ at my throwing every girl I could think of at him that he'd go out and find a date of his own to make me _shut up_ ," she says, "and I only stuck with girls because it wouldn't raise any eyebrows and get his back up that way." 

She sighs. "Because I'd already tried to suggest social stuff, parties, hobbies, clubs, activities, volunteering - I went and looked up and vetted every fucking Catholic church in DC. Nothing took. Steve woke up, ran, came to work, trained, ran missions, went home and went to bed. After Thor took Loki back to Asgard, Steve shook hands with Stark, shook hands with Banner, and walked away. He only saw Clint and me because of SHIELD. He only went to see Carter the first time because Nick told him he should.

"And he was reckless," she says, her voice twisting out of inflection, which with something like her means whatever she's saying, she doesn't like. "The kind of reckless that comes from not giving a fuck if you live or die, not the kind that comes from thinking you're invincible. Given his history," she notes, with a humourless smile, "I had a hard time selling that difference to anyone, but now? Now I know I'm right. He wasn't cocky and he wasn't confident. He just didn't care if he came back alive, as long as he died on-mission, doing something.

"Now," she says, and she's not waiting for him to answer, "he has a home he _keeps_ changing around the way he wants it, he's in and out of Tony's projects, he talks to Pepper about music, he has lunch and coffee and goes to shows and movies with people - people in his neighbourhood know his name and pretend they don't know what that means because they like seeing him. Because they see him at all. In the first two months you were home," she finishes, "he had a healthier fucking life than he did for two years in DC." 

There are two birds, crows, on the telephone pole closest. One more in the tree. He can see them moving, and the man and two children moving, and the wind moving the grass and he . . .tries to keep ahold of the fact that all of that is happening here. Now. 

And Romanova's talking. Was talking. Finished talking? He's not sure. 

Now she hesitates for a minute, watching his face, and he has no fucking idea what she sees, because the inside of his head is static and whiteness and he can understand English but he's not sure he could speak it if he tried. Isn't sure what she's trying to do. _Still_ doesn't know what the fuck she wants. 

When she says what she says next, it's quieter, more like she doesn't _know_ what the words might do. 

She says, "And that's all objective. Those are the things that I can list and then hand you studies out the ass that talk about why it's better for a fucking human being to live like that than live like he was before. Why it's healthier, why it makes people happier. That's all objective and concrete. 

"Subjectively, James," she says, maybe almost carefully, "I spent two years worrying about that idiot and not being sure how much I _should_ , because I didn't know, I couldn't know, what my fucking scale should be. I hadn't seen him any way but that. Now I can tell you: I spent two years worrying about someone who was half dead. And he isn't anymore." 

And that's where she stops. Stops talking, no more words. And for a while she sits, quietly, drinking the rest of . . .whatever the fuck she ordered, and watching the man and two kids fight about whether it was time to go home for lunch or not, whether or not they were wet and cold from playing in the field and falling down so much. 

The wind picks up again and it gets colder, rattling leaves from trees a hundred yards away. The birds, crows, take off. His chest still hurts. 

Eventually he manages to figure out how to make his voice work, talk, speak, like a person instead of . . . something else, and says, "Natalia." 

She looks at him, he can see her out of the corner of his eye, and he says, "You should go." 

He's not sure which language he says it in, but luckily it doesn't matter. When she says, "Okay," it's quiet, but doesn't sound like . . . anything else. Sad, or wistful, or afraid. Maybe that's good. Maybe not. He doesn't fucking know. He doesn't even fucking know what _good_ would mean, right here, right now. 

But she stops after she gets up. Doesn't finish leaving. She stands closer to him than he wants her to, with one hand in her jacket pocket, and now, suddenly, as the wind dies for a second, she smells like fear. 

Romanova takes something out of her pocket and puts it on the top of his cup. "Here," she says, abruptly. The word is in English. 

He sits up. Makes himself focus on what turns out to be a paper, folded many times. Water soluble paper: the texture's familiar, who fucking knows why. He doesn't. 

When he glances up and says, "What?" as he opens it, she's not looking at him. And he doesn't think she can. 

"That's a list," she says, very carefully and precisely, "of every . . . place, that I have. Prepared place. I wasn't sure I'd be . . . able to give it to you. But. If I have a," and she blinks a few times, rapidly, and then says, almost like she's falling back on something, "pledge of good faith, I figured it would be that. Some of them were . . . very fucking difficult to set up. Some of them I could replace, but - " She halts, then finishes, "Not those." 

While she talks she looks at the trees, and the road, and the empty field, the telephone pole and the bench. Anywhere but at him. 

He scans the paper, the addresses, the latitudes and longitudes. Some of them in the most locked down places on the planet, exactly the places you'd have nowhere else to go and no help, if you got in trouble there. 

After a moment of silence, he takes the lid off his cup and drops the paper in. Watches some of the tension leave her hands when it dissolves. 

He jerks his head toward the road. "Go," he says, quietly. 

He doesn't have to watch her leave. Not outright. But he waits until he can't see her before he gets up, dumps the liquid still in his cup on the grass and throws the cup in the garbage. And goes home.


	2. coda: steve | maria

When he was ten, Steve tried to grow an orange tree from a seed in a Christmas orange. It hadn't worked, but there were a lot of reasons for it not to work, not least of which had been New York winter and not heating anything unless someone was actually home. 

He's willing to admit the balcony garden is probably at least partly motivated by that failure, because these things do stick around, but he's fine with that. Cat-food cans make good seedling pots, the laundry nook got plenty of sun through its narrow window (which always makes him wonder what the tiny room _used_ to be, to have a window at all), and he's put up shelves higher than the kitten could jump. 

Besides, she doesn't like the laundry machines. They're loud, and vibrate, and she can't figure out what they do. Which means by default they obviously eat kittens. 

He's standing in the dining room when Bucky comes in, putting the last bunch on a little cardboard flat that the cat-food comes in, to carry it to the laundry room all in one go. Bucky acknowledges Steve's _hello_ with something that might be a _hey_ or might just be a noise, but otherwise goes straight to the bedroom. When he comes out, he's wearing loose sweats and a different t-shirt and comes to the kitchen to pour himself coffee, and then around to see what Steve's doing, leaning on the counter with the coffee in his left hand. 

And Steve's not expecting to get cuffed upside the head, even if it's not exactly hard, so he ends up dropping one of the basil cans and almost knocking the flat off. He frowns at Bucky, who isn't quite glaring, and demands, "What the Hell was that for?" 

"For spending two years with SHIELD trying to get your _stupid_ ass killed," Bucky says, flatly. "That's what the Hell that was for." 

Steve stares at him for a second, blinking, the wheels of his train of thought spinning uselessly until intuition takes a wild stab and Steve says, "What did Natasha tell you?" 

Because it would be Natasha - so far Clint's left Bucky more or less alone and besides, he wouldn't bother bringing that kind of thing up. For that matter he probably doesn't bother _thinking_ about that kind of thing. But Natasha - 

Is Natasha. 

"Enough," Bucky replies, shortly. 

Steve runs through a lot of answers, some of which are basically arguments because he still doesn't actually agree with Natasha's assessment that he'd really been trying to get himself killed, as opposed to just being . . . angry about a lot of things and looking for an outlet, and weighs them against getting anywhere right now. 

Weighs them, also, against how fast Bucky got changed, the fact that for whatever reason she had Natasha obviously tracked him down _this morning_ , and the part where, given that, the overdone glare and snarl out of nowhere is probably thin cover for being worn thinner than Bucky likes. 

So Steve rolls his eyes and says, "Okay, fine. I'm sorry." And tries to sweep all of the dirt back into the can along with the seed. 

"Better be," Bucky retorts, leaning against the counter. Then he demands, "What are you doing?" 

"I am sprouting seeds," Steve replies blandly. Then adds, "Hopefully." He puts the can into the flat, and puts the others in beside it. 

Bucky gives him a long look, and says, "Still pissed off about the orange seed." 

Steve gets caught between affront and a secret delight that the orange seed is something Bucky remembers, but goes for affront when he says, "That died because of the cold." 

"Yeah," Bucky says. "Sure. Or you kill plants." 

"You wait and see, scoffer," Steve retorts. And he would pick up the flat and take it to the shelves in the laundry room, except that Bucky's put down his coffee and catches Steve's arm instead, pulling him over. Which is _fine_ , and if the kiss Bucky pulls him into is on the edge of desperate, Steve can find out why later. 

He slides a hand under Bucky's shirt and across his stomach to his hip; Bucky's right hand tightens behind his neck, fingertips digging in. 

Maybe a lot later. 

 

*****

 

It's a knock on her actual door, not a buzz from someone outside, so for a minute or two Maria wonders what the hell one of her neighbours could want at noon on a Saturday. And seriously considers whether she gives enough of a fuck to answer her door while she's in her slouchy sweatpants, no bra and slippers.

Then she glances at the monitor that shows the hallway outside her door. And blinks. And shoves herself to her feet so she can get to the door, throw back the locks and undo the chain. 

Natasha's not wearing makeup. She often doesn't, if there's no particular reason, certainly doesn't _need_ to, but to Maria's eye right now she's not wearing makeup because she was and it's come off. Which is just a little different. Her hair looks like the wind's been attacking it for a while, and so do her cheeks; when she takes her hands out of the pockets of her leather jacket they're red with cold. 

"Hi," Maria says, and tells her body to can the adrenaline, because if someone had _died_ , she'd've heard about it long before Natasha had time to walk around outside in the cold and let the wind chap her face. 

"Hey," Natasha says, and it's subdued, and Maria - 

Hesitates. Doesn't have the confidence, since Insight, to be _sure_ about reading Natasha. Not like this, not when there's . . . obviously this much to read. Because she doesn't know what happened, or why and she's careful, right now. Since settling back in the US Natasha's been _friendly_ , but with Natasha that doesn't actually mean anything except she doesn't want to fight: Natasha can and has spent years being perfectly friendly with people she'd rather hang up by their ankles for target practice. All _friendly_ means is she's past the point where Maria's very existence makes her want to reach for a knife. 

And as best she can, Maria's respected that. Left the ball in Natasha's court. She doesn't want to push Natasha, not in any direction, because with Natasha any direction you _push_ ends up being _away_. 

But it means she doesn't know what to say. 

Natasha takes a breath and says, in a voice that's just cheerful enough to say she doesn't want to talk about whatever it is that's thrown her, but not in any way convincing enough to fool anyone, "I don't know what you're doing today, but, um." She pauses. Then she says, "I could really use too many cosmos and an awful movie." 

It's not so much an olive branch as a whole tree. Maybe an orchard. 

Maria steps back and makes a not-quite-sweeping gesture. " _PS: I Love You_?" she suggests, like they've still done this once a month since forever, and there hasn't been the break and the silence in between. 

She tentatively trusts herself to read _relief_ on Nat's face, in her shoulders, as Nat briefly closes her eyes and then says, "Sounds perfect." 

Maria doesn't actually have the right stuff for cosmos right now, but this is fucking New York: that's what delivery services are for.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] be transparent for a while](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4209384) by [echolalaphile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/echolalaphile/pseuds/echolalaphile)




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